Monday, August 17, 2009

Happy Monday Creators, Zach here to share a creative project I had some fun with over the weekend. Besides the fact that Michele is already writing 6 other blogs this week, and that I love taking over her blog, I actually had some creative fun myself last weekend. I will give you this much, it wasn’t my idea to take on this project, but my girlfriend insisted so away we went. A certain friend of mine (who may or may not be the Creative Services Director for Simply Michele) is having a baby like ASAP.. And being the 'not so motivated friend' that I am, I might have waited a little too long, as in the baby is due Friday, to get a gift. Knowing that the baby shower had passed, and I was way behind the 8 ball, I decided I needed to do something a little different so I wasn’t just the crappy friend with the last minute present. In comes my girlfriend with the idea for a Diaper Cake. “A what?” I said. She proceeded to explain to me this clever little idea she found roaming the internet, where you roll diapers up into little... well, diaper rolls and then arrange them around a wooden dowel, or in our case, a wine bottle, to make a multi-layered cake. The supplies you will need are:

Diapers (I did 90, but if you want to get elaborate get as many as you can afford, you can make this thing as big as you want)Assorted sized rubber bandsA wooden dowel or a wine bottle or anything circular you can wrap the diapers aroundA big piece of cardboardA roll of cellophane Double-sided tapeThin ribbon and also thick decorative ribbon, Little goodies for the baby, the new mom, or the new dad (baby lotion, bottles, diaper rash cream, etc.)

(Sorry some of the pictures are a little blurry, I did the best I could with my iPhone. Ha.)

To start you roll a lot of diapers and keep them tight with small rubber bands. We set a wine bottle on a big book (we later transferred it to a piece of cardboard for the wrapping process, so if you have the cardboard in the first place, I’d recommend using it instead of trying to transfer later) and then we began arranging the diapers in a circle around the bottle. Once we had one full row of diapers around the bottle, we used a larger rubber band to hold them all in place. Then, we took off each individual rubber band from the diapers, this way they are all held in place by the one big rubber band and whomever you give it to doesn’t have to spend hours taking off little rubber bands. You do this as many times as you like depending on how many rows you want on your bottom layer. We did four rows on the bottom layer, two rows on the middle layer and one around the top, and that’s just because I didn’t feel like going out at 8 o’clock on a Saturday night to get more diapers. Now that you have 4 rows, each row held in place by its own rubber band, you pull out random diapers from the first 3 rows and replace them with little presents (the key is to hide as many presents as you can on the inner layers, with only a few showing on the last row of diapers before the outer row, then its more of a surprise when they find the other ones inside. You don’t want any presents on the actual outside layer, only diapers, this just makes it look better, do you ever see an actual cake with the insides on the outside? Didn’t think so).

Presents in place? Alright, moving on. To start the second layer, you do the same as the first, except this time, you may have a few obstacles to work around due to the presents being different heights than the diapers, you just have to work the diapers around these and make sure they are hidden. Like I said, I did 4:2:1 on my cake layers from bottom to top, but the more layers or rows you do, the more room you have to hide stuff. Once you have your rows in place on the second layer, all rubber banded in place, hide more presents in the inside rows.

Depending on how many layers you decide to go with, or the height of whatever you are building the cake around, you just keep repeating the process until you get to the final layer. Our top layer was just one last row of diapers around the top of the wine bottle and BAM! You have yourself a diaper cake!

(if you notice we covered our rubber bands with thin blue ribbon, you don’t have to do this, we just had a transparent decorative ribbon, so we decided to do this to help hide the rubber bands)

Now all you have to do is spruce it up a bit, use the decorative ribbon to cover up your rubber bands on the outside of each layer and use the double-sided tape to hold it in place. Keep a few small presents (the little binky things, toys, anything that didn’t fit very well in the place of a diaper) and tie them onto the cake using the thin ribbon. Wrap the ribbon around one of the outer layer diapers and tie your present in place, just a little extra decoration for the outside.

Finally, lay out some cellophane, you can use the rolls or a bag if you can find one big enough. I used a roll, so I set my cake on a big piece of it I had rolled out to the appropriate length to fit around my cake and this all depends on the size of your cake. I’d say go bigger than you think you need, because you can always cut the excess off the top and its frustrating when you think you have enough and you don’t. Wrap it up, using the double-sided tape to keep the sides of the cellophane together and bunch the top and tie it with a ribbon. There, now you should have a diaper cake that looks like you went out and bought it at a store!

People seriously sell these things for like hundreds of dollars, so this is a fun and cheaper way to give a creative gift. There are so many different ways to do these things, search 'diaper cakes' on google and you are sure to find many more ideas than just the ones I've given you here. This is just how I did it, so nobody email me and tell me I did this step or that step wrong, creativity is all your own and it usually leads you away from the step by step and down an unbeaten path. Follow that creativity in all your projects including this one and have some fun!

Cheers to being young enough to say that this is my first gift to a friend who is having a baby! Oh how I love the age of 23!